Companies such as Siemens USA, Best Buy, and Sun Microsystems use social media to form powerful online communities. Those communities — through an "amplification effect" — foster innovation and process improvements far more quickly than companies can achieve with traditional improvement mechanisms.

Sun cofounder Bill Joy famously observed that "innovation happens elsewhere" [1]. He went on to observe that no matter how intelligent the innovators in a company, there are far more smart people outside that company.